A CONVERSATION with ERROL BUDDLE by Mike Mckeon*
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A CONVERSATION WITH ERROL BUDDLE by Mike McKeon* ______________________________________________________ [The following results from Mike McKeon’s initial interview with Errol Buddle in Sydney in December, 2011 and subsequent Skype conversations and phone calls which were completed in April, 2012. This piece was published in Jazzline, the official publication of the Victorian Jazz Club, Vol 45, No 1, Autumn 2012.] The great saxophonist Errol Buddle… Mike McKeon: It’s great to meet you at last Errol. It is very kind of you to give us the time to hear about your musical career as one of the most talented ‘doublers’ in Australian music ‘royalty’ along with Don Burrows amongst others. Many people may not know of your exploits - perhaps because you were in America for some years. It was here though that the Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet [AJQ] became one of the five most popular jazz groups in all America for some years. Could we start with where were you born? _______________________________________________________ * Mike [AKA Mick] McKeon started playing clarinet and later saxophones from age 16. He co-founded The Beavers big band with Glasgow visitor Albert Higgins which launched a number of well-known pro Melbourne musicians. He worked on Nauru Is for three years, then sailed single-handed around the Pacific for a few years returning to music in the late 70’s. Recently he has run the Let’s Dance Big Band and plays in a number of small groups. He took on the editorship for four years of the Victorian Jazz Club’s newsletter and then the magazine Jazzline. He interviewed Don Burrows in April 2010, with video filming by Lois and Fred Stephenson, and Errol Buddle in December 2011 for the magazine. 1 Errol Buddle: In Reynella, a small town near Adelaide, 1928 on the 29th of April which also happens to be Duke Ellington’s birthday. Mike: Your mother arranged that no doubt? And was the family musical? Errol: No not really, my mother worked as a maid on the estate of Mr John Reynell who created the famous Reynella Wines and didn’t play anything. I heard that my father played the piano in a church in Clarendon as a teenager and we had a piano in the house but he never touched it and I didn’t know he could play it. He didn’t have much interest in music and I think he only ever heard me play once that I know of when he came to a concert late in his life. Dad joined the Royal Australian Flying Corps [the forerunner of the RAAF] in 1917. He was sent to Egypt and stationed in Cairo where he flew bi-plane Sopwith Camels. They used to back up Lawrence of Arabia in bombing raids on Turkish trains etc. However he was discharged because he was racing a train one day and hit a telegraph pole when flying low and pranged the plane and broke his leg and other injuries. I still have his khaki uniform with wings on it. He brought back a lot of beautiful photos of Cairo and others of planes crashed into the desert. Historical stuff. Apparently I used to enjoy the buskers when I was around five years old - they said I used to jog up and down to the music; this was of course during the Depression years. My mother said that one day she saw a busker pack up his stuff, walk around the corner and get into a brand new Chevrolet! Mike: Did you have brothers or sisters? One of the earliest shots of Don Burrows (centre, on clarinet) then aged about 16 years old, with Wally Norman (left, on trumpet) with Al Vincer (right, on vibes)… 2 Errol: No, there were lots of cousins but I was the only one in our family. Mike: You were like Don Burrows then, the only one. Did you get into music like Don by listening to the radio? Errol: No, Don got interested in music at a younger age than I did. I unfortunately didn’t know jazz existed until I was around 16. I had obviously heard jazz in movies etc - I would have heard Harry James, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey in films - but it never really registered with me. When I was a student at the Adelaide College of Music I went to a jazz concert one night in Adelaide to hear some former students such as Bobby Limb [later well known as a variety show entertainer and host on TV - Ed.] and Syd Beckwith, a great alto player who eventually went to Canada – I just Bobby Limb: Errol can still remember some of the phrases that Bobby played… went to hear them play and I was absolutely ‘knocked out’, this turned me onto jazz for the first time . It hit me like a bombshell. I still remember some of the phrases that Bobby played, they really got to me so I went home that night and turned on the radio and found jazz on late night ABC – and listened to Fats Waller and all those great players. I was so taken with the tenor and the way Bobby played that later on when I got an alto I used to play solos in the bottom register to sound like a tenor. 3 Mike: Now from the Best of Buddles Doubles CD cover there is a photo of you with a ‘curved’ soprano sax at eight years old, was that your first instrument? Errol: No, about a year before that my mother used to listen to a weekly program on the radio by the Adelaide Banjo Club and she thought it would nice for me to play the banjo mandolin so she enrolled me into the club and I started to play that and I was also playing the metal Fife in the school band at this time. Then one day after several months Mr John Ellerton Becker the head of the music school – who later became Sir John Becker – said to some of the banjo students including Bobby Limb who was four years older than me – “I am getting 11 brand new saxophones from the United States and if any of your parents would like you to play one of these then I’ll tell them how much they are and we’ll start you on the saxophone”. This is in the middle of the depression! So several of us students went along and there around this room were all these open saxophone cases. John Ellerton Becker: he brought in 11 brand new saxophones from the United States… Mike: It must have been magic – like kids in a toy shop! Errol: Well they were American Conns which are much in demand today. I saw the big one, the bass sax. That’s what I wanted to play! Mike: A bass sax even then? Errol: Yes, two sopranos, four altos, two tenors, two baritones and the bass sax which of course I wasn’t big enough to play so I finished up with a soprano sax. I was the youngest in the band so I got the smallest instrument. Mike: Was it the ‘curved’ soprano or the straight one? 4 Errol: It was the straight one at first, then the teacher got some ‘curved’ ones as they were much easier to hold for an eight year old. Anyway at that school, which he named the Adelaide College of Music, he formed Drum and Fife Bands, a Drum and Bugle Corp and a great big concert or military band as they were known in those days. There were about 90 kids playing in it. I can’t remember how many instruments there were but something like ten sousaphones, 22 clarinets, 16 saxophones, a couple of oboes and bassoons, several flutes and piccolos, alto flutes, trumpets, trombones, flugelhorns etc. And every year he’d put on an extravaganza concert called On Parade at the Tivoli Theatre for seven nights with the whole school. The stage was tiered for the concert band with the 10 sousaphones across the back in a row - a master-piece of production. Mike: That sounds marvellous, nothing like it then? Errol: Or now. Mike: Did your folks have to buy the instrument? Errol, aged eight, with his curved Conn soprano sax… Errol: Oh yes, it cost around £40 – probably around eight or more weeks’ wages. About six months from when we got the saxes we were booked into the Prince Edward theatre in Sydney to play on stage in between movies – the main movie was The General Died At Dawn with Gary Cooper. We learned several arrangements and we really practiced a lot with this eleven saxophone band, so much so that I got quite bored with it. One section in The Teddy Bears Picnic was just a repetitive four-note 5 to the bar phrase and I got so bored I just faked playing it. All up Mr Becker took the eleven-member saxophone band and the Drum and Fife band of around 200 kids to Sydney by train in January for a week in 1937 playing seven nights, then back to Adelaide of course. Mike: Now we are getting near the end of your Primary School years, what tutors did you have? Errol: I had a private lesson on Saturday morning with Les Mitchell the lead alto at the Palais Royal [a big ballroom in Adelaide], and on another night a class lesson. Les was more of a classical player so he didn’t teach us how to play Jazz, just how to play the sax naturally.